Happy Halloween, friends, and welcome to another make-a-fandom-inspired-thing post! This year, I wanted to do the Katniss Everdeen, the Girl on Fire dress from the first movie, and of course, I looped my MMC in on it too. This post will cover the first phase of the process, which mostly involves a lot of painting. Hope you enjoy!
Step One: Mix and paint
I did this entire process of painting my own Katniss dress using acrylic paint and this magical substance called Textile Medium. Both of these things are available at your local craft store, or on Amazon most likely; I got mine from Hobby Lobby and Michaels.
Once supplies are purchased, the simple step to follow is to mix one part of the acrylic paint in a color of your choice with one part textile medium. Super easy! The hardest part for me was eyeballing the right ratios and making sure I didn’t mix too much or too little for the areas I wanted to paint.
Then it was just a matter of painting a layer, letting it dry, painting the other side of the dress, letting that dry, rinse and repeat. I have a process video of this on my Instagram if you’re a fan of the timelapse : ).
I ended up doing two layers of paint to cover my original red dress with a gradient from yellow to deep red. I also added a TON of glitter and metallic paint to try and get as shiny an effect as I could. Nothing is going to match the actual Girl On Fire look, but we did our best.
Step Two: Wash and dry
Once the painting was done, the next step was to allow the whole thing to dry, then heat set and wash the dress. I was going to use a blow dryer, but then my mom suggested using the clothes dryer instead. So much faster!
Once the paint had been heat set into the fabric, I put the dress in the washing machine on a gentle setting. This was supposed to make it softer and more dress-like, as it was quite stiff after so much paint. And it did get softer… while wet. Unfortunately, the top part, where I had to paint more in order to cover up the original red color, did stay pretty stiff. Oh, well, it still looks pretty good!
Conclusion
The next step in my DIY Katniss interview dress process will be sewing, sewing, and more sewing! Which is gonna be crazy and take WAY more time than I think it will! Lucky for me, I still have five more days of fall break, plus a week or so before the Halloween celebration I want to wear this thing to, so it’s fiiiiiine, I’m sure we’ll get there XD.
If you enjoyed this little process thing of today, then you might enjoy the DIY Lucy Gray Baird dress I made last year for the premier of the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes movie. You can read that post here : )
Are you dressing up for Halloween/just because you want to? What are you planning? I’d love to know!
Have a great day!